carly ann smallbird

I wrote this original poem after reading and feeling things about "Having 'Having a Coke with You' with You", and Du Fu and Li Bai's poems about each other.

Sweet-Talking Li Bai

诶 大侠
中圣花醉
银河上之客人
hey you swashbuckler,¹
wine-besotted flower-lover,²
wanderer among the stars³—

快点下来跟我聊一会儿⁴
come down so we can talk for a second.

等什么，老骨头在下界之内闷死了
please. my old bones gets lonely down here—

ascend how many thousand cloud stairs?⁵ you want to ask an old man to—

alright! alright, forget about that
forget that we're Du Fu and Li Bai
this nameless raft⁶ will do us

do you remember when we slept under the same quilt
in the same bed⁷
and I still (with a mind running on verse)⁸
wouldn't stop composing drunken nonsense
and you dragged the blanket over our heads
(exposing my poor bloodless feet with their veins and bunions)
and we started giggling like great foolish children

thinking back, I do think our breathlessness (you inhaled wrong
and started to cough in deep barks, I flung
the mass of cotton off and put it to rights)
better
than most kinds of verse
the moments of not knowing what to say
beads of each other's spittle and breath on our beards
—well it wasn’t poetry
it wasn’t significant dreams⁹
it wasn’t meaning or allusions or the story of ambition
the slice of shining red atop the pouch of your eyelids
and the way the excellent unfiltered wine
tends to give you gas, your guts gurgling
and moving about in the silence

—alright then! You tell me what it means
O Angel of Poetry¹⁰

我咋不把这事编个诗？
等你的写完了送给我看啊
—yeah you bet I'm making a poem out of this. I want to see yours when you're done.¹¹

1. A reference to Li Bai’s reputation as a wandering swordsman in his youth; purportedly he killed someone, although this isn’t certain.

2. From Li Bai’s poem 贈孟浩然 “A Farewell-Present to Meng Haoran”: 醉月频中圣，迷花不事君。“Moon-drunk, every night you attain new mysteries / Flower-dreaming, no more days of serving the throne.”

3. From Li Bai’s poem 月下独酌 “Drinking Alone Under the Moon”: 永结无情游，相期邈云汉。 “Forever connected, mercilessly left to roam / Until we meet far away among the stars.”

4. Informal speech.

5. From an anachronistic “Qixi Festival” by Li Qingzhao: 云阶月地 “cloud stairs between the moon and earth”.

6. From both the above “Qixi Festival” and Du Fu’s 江上值水如海势聊短述 “A short post: The river was raging like the ocean”: 故着浮槎替入舟 “An old raft will do me, no need for a boat.”

7. From Du Fu’s 与李十二白同寻范十隐居 “Li Bai and I Visit the Hermit Fan”: 余亦東蒙客，憐君如弟兄。醉眠秋共被，攜手日同行。
   as we sojourn in Dongmeng
   I've come to love you as a true brother --
   this autumn of sleeping drunk under one quilt
   strolling hand in hand by day.

8. The above poem by Du Fu (江上值水如海势聊短述) ends with the poet wishing to find a like mind to wander and compose poetry with.

9. Many of Du Fu’s poems about dreaming of Li Bai allude to his worries about the exiled poet’s fate, as well as the question of what worldly ambition or efforts to serve one’s country is truly worth.

10. One of Li Bai’s epithets was 诗仙, “Immortal of Poetry”.

11. I really, sincerely mean it. SEND ME YOUR LI BAI RESPONSE RP.